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08.08.2017 Feature Article

“Zey Give Zemselves A Haandred!.... A Haandred!”

Zey Give Zemselves A Haandred!.... A Haandred!
08.08.2017 LISTEN

Ei, so Paul Kagame claims he got 99% of the vote in Rwanda in the presidential election of 4 August 2017? That means he will be Rwanda's President for a third seven-year term.

That verdict probably reflects his true standing in the country. But he really got 99 percent? Do me a favour!

It reminds me of the time when the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe used to announce that they'd got 100 percent of the votes cast in “elections” they had held in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland and other Soviet satellites.

Certainly, claiming to have obtained an unrealistic number of votes in an election does not demonstrate the strength of a party but rather, its weakness.

Y0u see, parties that enjoy real popular support don't obsess about what percentage of votes they get. Implementing a well-thought-out agenda should make party leaders extremely busy and not have the time to play the numbers game. When they achieve good, visible results, they don't need to massage figures. Neither do they need to stay in power too long for that can make the leadership boring to the populace. It can safely be speculated, I think, that it was sheer boredom with dull, unimaginative, bureaucratic administrations that eventually killed off communism in Europe. But what do I know?

The absurdity of the claim of 100 support was the subject of one of the best jokes told by an unforgettable character who used to live in Ghana in the 1960s, a Jamaican novelist called Neville Dawes, author of the novel, The Last Enchantment.

His wit was simply 'wicked'! The story he told me and other friends was this: there was a guy who hung around Oxford University called Otto, a Central European who had fast-footed it to England in order not to be swept away by the advance of socialism in Eastern Europe. In the UK, right-wing organisations welcomed him (as was their wont) and helped him to become a sort of “permanent student” to whom grants could be channelled without questions being asked.

But Otto was such a spendthrift that he was always broke and therefore attended any students' meeting at which he knew tea and sandwiches, scones or biscuits, would be served. One day, at such a gathering, the speaker began enumerating the size of the political support a European country's political movements were claiming for themselves. He began – the Social Democrats claim 21%; the Christian Unionists 18%; and the Communists....”

As soon as the name of the Communist Party was mentioned, Otto interrupted the speaker and cried out loudly: “Zey give zemselves a haaandred!.... A haaaandred!”

Everybody laughed. And so did we, when Neville Dawes told us the story. Neville's ironic insinuation was that if you were going to claim false figures, then claim the utmost, for people like Otto would never believe you anyway!

I am reminded of this story both by the figures Paul Kagame is alleged to have obtained in the Rwandan election,and also by the “controversy” that has broken out in Ghana regarding how the state of Ghana was founded and whether it was Kwame Nkrumah and his CPP or J B Danquah and his UGCC who should be credited with being the “founder” of Ghana.

Indeed, the question is an idle one which should not distract our attention from such life-and-death issues as galamsey. But so inane does the journalistic agenda tend to be in Ghana that it was thrown at me, out of the blue, by Paul Adom-Ochere when I appeared on his TV programme, Good Evening Ghana, (MetroTV), on 31 July 2017.

Of course on a live TV programme, I had to respond and I told him that my own view is that Dr Kwame Nkrumah's position as the single most influential person in Ghana's struggle for independence is not in any doubt. But resentment at that fact had been created by the excessive

emphasis of his role in the struggle, to the exclusion of everyone else's – including his own lieutenants such as K A Gbedema, Kojo Botsio and N A Welbeck – to say nothing of Dr J B Danquah and the other members of “The Big Six” club (Ako Adjei, Edward Akufo Addo, William Ofori Atta and E Obetsebi Lamptey.)

But (I pointed out) if say, a school's founder, laid the foundation of the school but could not, either for pecuniary or other reasons (say death) complete the building and someone else, or some people, came to complete the building and put students in it, would they not be acting in a selfish and egotistical manner if they named themselves as the sole founders of the school? Especially if they tried to erase the name of the originator of the school idea from any connection with the founding of the school?

People appreciate fair-play, and when you mention Achimota School, for instance, the names of at least three people always come up for mention – Guggisberg, Frazer and Aggrey. Is it necessary to dissect the trio, isolate one among them and credit him with having founded Achimota? The school was named Prince of Wales College, for crying out loud! Ad that was not merely because the founders necessarily wanted to honour the British royalty but because they were all were all noble, self-effacing individuals.

In my view, it is the arrogance and egotism of the Convention People's Party, the sycophancy of its leadership (as acknowledged by Kwaku Boateng's “We were all gaping sycophants” comment after the overthrow of Dr Kwame Nkrumah); its overweening devotion to empty propaganda and its general intolerance of views which made the party decide to make Kwame Nkrumah the sole “civitatis Ghaniensis conditor” (founder of the state of Ghana) with his head on Ghanaian coins. People waited, and at the right time, they began to dismantle what they had resented silently as “the cult of personality” around Nkrumah. Colonel Emanuel Kotoka, in his short broadcast announcing the coup d'etat of 2 February 1966, found room in it to say that “The myth surrounding Kwame Nkrumah is broken!”

You see, action begets reaction, and since the CPP's slogan more or less changed from the “Forward ever backward never” motto of the glorious pre-independence days, to the more aggressive and intolerant “CPP up! United Party down – down, down, down to the gutter!” was waiting to be expunged with a vengeance – and it was.

Even people who admired Nkrumah his courage and the clear-thinking that marked his strategic decisions about how to force the British out, frowned upon the fact that he had taken all the glory of the struggle for himself. He did not even ask the CPP Central Committee to choose a deputy for itself, after he became Life Chairman. When he became Prime Minister,too, he did not appoint a Deputy Prime Minister, although either Komla Gbedema or Kojo Botsio could have acquitted himself creditably in that position. After all, when the CPP was in its infancy, and therefore in its most vulnerable state, it was Gbedemah who led it superbly when Nkrumah was put in prison by the British. Why could Gbedema not have led it in the more favourable circumstances of an independent Ghana, should the occasion have arisen? Is it any wonder that he later sold himself to the CIA?.

Nkrumah was vain, although he tried to pass off excessive glorification of himself as a necessary tactic that was to drive the fact home to the largely illiterate populace that the British had really gone and that it was Kwame Nkrumah who ruled them now. And that inevitably led to a desire by the people who did not like his policies to try and obliterate his image, once he was not around any longer. It may well be that they would have given him his due had they not felt so bitter towards him.

As to the history of Ghana itself, the facts are clear – the struggle against the colonialists only started in earnest in 1897, when the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society (ARPS) was formed by intellectuals and businessmen to fight – both here and in the UK – against the seizure of Ghana's ancestral lands by the British Crown. Among the leading members of the ARPS were John Mensah Sarbah, Kobina Sekyi, J E Casely Hayford and J W De Graft Johnson.

Significantly, the businessman, Alfred (“Paa”) Grant (who was only 18 when the ARPS was formed) became a member of the ARPS. And it was at “Paa” Grant's suggestion that – as Dr J B Danquah himself acknowledged – the United Gold Coast Convention [UGCC] was formed in August 1947. So it can be said that through Paa Grant, the APRS led seamlessly to the formation of the UGCC, and just as the UGCC, by inviting Kwame Nkrumah to become its Secretary-General in 1947, also afforded Nkrumah the opportunity (at the very east) to have an organisation from which to break away to form the Convention People's Party in 1949! Of course, it was he CP that he used with great effect to achieve independence for Ghana. But would there have been a CPP without a UGCC? Even more important, would Nkrumah have returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 had there not been a UGCC? To see the UGCC only in terms of what it achieved politically, and ignore the significance of its having been existence at a crucial time with a stated objective to which even Nkrumah could work for (whatever his reservations about its methods) is therefore a myopic way of looking at history. .

We should, however, jettison this penchant of ours to apportion glory to some and and deny it to others – all on the basis of happenings in a past era, when many of our people had not even been born. The Americans decided to recognise the pat that Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson played in America's history – and finished with it for ever. Why can't we too pay our respects to a “collective leadership”, and stop the unprofitable argumentation? The past is safer for many of us, isn't it? You cannot do anything about the past except exchange hot words about it, whereas the present has its crying problems, which need brilliant thinking and tough action to solve – qualities which, alas, we seem to have thrown to the winds, if ever we possessed them in the first place.

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